HIST 246: The American Civil War Era

Here is the Google Doc that we used in class today to divide our labor for the exhibit. Please note which page you have been assigned to write text for.

As you begin thinking about your page, remember that there are various resources about Dowling that you can draw on for information, including the collection itself, this earlier blog post, and the resources and blogs collected last semester.

Please be scrupulous about noting down the source for information and facts that you plan to quote or use in your text for this assignment. We will be working on this in class next week, and you will need to have a rough draft ready to share with classmates next Friday, our last day of class.

In class today we developed a rough outline of sections for our exhibits. But now we need to do a quick analysis of how the “items” in our collection might be distributed across those sections. Not every item in the collection has to be mentioned in our exhibit, but we do need a sense of which items could conceivably be used in each section so that we can decide how to break the sections up into pages.

Since we will need to make that decision on Wednesday, your assignment for class is to browse through the collection and make a note of items relevant to the section you were assigned in class. Then, make a list of those items, together with a brief (just a few words) description of what the item is, on this Writeboard, which you can access using “dowling” as the password.

Here’s what we had on the board by the end of class:

Abby suggested that we open the exhibit by juxtaposing Jefferson Davis’s battlefield speech with the text of the historical marker erected in the 1990s and posing the question “How did we get here?” (It occurs to me that we could also on this splash page juxtapose the original location of the statue with its current one, which raises the same sort of question.)

After that we came up with three rough sections:

1. Elizabeth and Clare will be finding items related to “The Battle of Sabine Pass: What actually happened.” This section may also reference the facts of Dowling’s life, but we agreed that his business enterprises and Irish ethnicity would probably be better emphasized in later sections, when discussing how later commemorations emphasized these parts of his life.

2. Abby, Matt, and Michael will be finding items related to the way Dowling was remembered in the immediate aftermath of the Battle up to the early twentieth century, for a section that will emphasize how Dowling was remembered as a Confederate hero and the initial construction of the statue.

3. Adam and Zach will be finding items related to those who were interested in remembering Dowling from about 1958 on, especially Anne Caraway Ivins, for a section that will help contextualized and explain the movement towards emphasizing his Irishnessness and business exploits and deemphasizing his Confederate service.

You may wish to confer with your group members to divide the labor for Wednesday. Also be aware that if you find only a few items that seem relevant in the actual Omeka collection, there may be relevant items that we could import into the exhibit listed on or linked from this page.

On Wednesday, using the information on the Writeboard, we will finalize the organization of our exhibit and assign pages to work on during the last week of class.

As discussed in class today, we need to decide next week on the basic structure of our exhibit for the Dowling collection. That means that over the weekend, you should read the following items; on Monday, you will be the “resident experts” about these texts, so be prepared to answer questions about them as we discuss our plans together.

• Clare and Elizabeth: Read Living Memory of Dick Dowling and Andrew Forest Muir’s article on Dick Dowling
• Michael and Dr. McDaniel: Read Dowling the Confederate War Hero and Historians on Dowling Over Time, Irish Confederates, and Sectional Disunion
• Abby and Matt: Civil Rights Era Legacy of Dowling, More on Emancipation Park, and The Name of the Road
• Adam and Zach: The Modern Memory of Dowling, The Monument Restoration Movement, and these items in the collection

We will use the Google documents to orient our discussion on Monday. All of the work represented in these documents will be reflected in our finished product, but we don’t necessarily have to stick absolutely to the structure they outline for the exhibit. As we discussed today, there are several possible ways of organizing the exhibit, especially now that we have so many more items than we did in the spring semester. Should the sections be chronological? Thematic? The “multiple faces” of Dowling? Some combination? Think about that question as you read and be prepared to share your viewpoint in class.

You should also have a look at the projects produced by students last semester, which are available on our OWL-Space Resources page. The map group’s work is in the folder “Dowling Map,” the podcast group’s work is in the folder “Dowling Podcast”, and there is also a link to the dynamic timeline made by the Timeline group. The movie you have seen before, but you may want to refresh your memory. Each of these groups recorded their own reflections and discussions on their blogs, linked from the course webpage from last semester. You may want to browse some of their posts as we think about how to structure the Omeka exhibit.

Here are some links to Dowling resources that you should begin looking through. Obviously you may not read through all of these by Friday, but get started, get as far as you can, and keep track of what you’ve looked at and record any questions you have.

• Items already in our Omeka collection
• Other resources collected last semester, especially the other items at the HPL/HMRC

See you tomorrow for our discussion of Levine.